Roy J. Harris Jr.

Roy J. Harris Jr. (born October 2, 1946) is a longtime newspaper, magazine and online-site reporter and editor, who spent most of his career with The Wall Street Journal. He writes frequently about the journalism Pulitzer Prizes, and is the author of Pulitzer’s Gold, www.pulitzersgold.com a book telling back stories of 100 years of reporting that has won the nation’s top journalism prize: the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

A regular contributor to the Poynter Institute online site, he does an annual preview prior to the day the Pulitzer Prizes are announced...^[1]

Early life and education

Harris was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Roy J. Harris, and raised in suburban Webster Groves. The younger Harris attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., earning a Bachelor of Science in Journalism degree in 1968 and a Master of Science in Journalism degree in 1971 from its Medill School of Journalism. While there he was managing editor of the student publication The Daily Northwestern.

He served in the U.S. Army from 1969 to 1970, stationed in Hanau, Germany, returning to complete his graduate work at Northwestern/Medill.

Career

After receiving his master’s he joined The Wall Street Journal Pittsburgh bureau in 1971. In 1974 he moved to the Journal Los Angeles bureau, taking over coverage of aerospace and defense and writing about airlines, among other topics. Prior to the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles he was the Journal reporter assigned to cover the business of the Olympics in Southern California. His aviation stories covered such topics as the development of secret “Stealth aircraft” and air safety. From 1988 to 1994 he was deputy chief of the Journal’s 14-member Los Angeles bureau, helping manage coverage of such events as rioting after the 1992 police beating of motorist Rodney King, and the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

In 1996 Harris became senior editor of The Economist Group’s Boston-based CFO Magazine, writing feature stories and a column on mergers and acquisitions. While at CFO he wrote Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism,^[2] a critically acclaimed book published by the University of Missouri Press. He also served from 2005 to 2007 as national president of the American Society of Business Publication Editors,^[3] and later became president of the nonprofit ASBPE Foundation.^[4]

In 2010 Harris was founding editor of CFOworld.com, an online publication of Framingham, Mass.-based IDG Enterprise (International Data Group), from which he retired in 2012.

Since the publication of Pulitzer’s Gold he has appeared at journalism schools and events around the country to talk about prizewinning reporting. Among his contributions to the Poynter.org site of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Poynter Institute are historic retrospective articles. He wrote 10-year retrospectives about the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-winning disclosures about sexual abuse of parishioners by Catholic priests^[5] (2013); about the prize-winning coverage of 9/11 by the Wall Street Journal;^[6] and about the winning New York Times coverage of the attacks.^[7] Harris also makes frequent appearances on Boston’s public television media commentary show Beat the Press.^[8][9]

Parade Magazine in 2013 asked Harris to give his view of the most important Pulitzer Prize winners of the last quarter century.^[10]

In a relationship with the Washington Post, Harris produced an article in 2014 citing "five myths" about the Pulitzer Prizes.^[11] For a number of years he led the Post’s online chat] on the day of the Pulitzer announcements.^[12]

The research for Pulitzer’s Gold began in 2002, when Harris returned to St. Louis to make a presentation, on the hundredth anniversary of his father's birth, about the five Public Service Pulitzers won by the Post-Dispatch. His father had been involved with four of those Pulitzer-winning projects. The 2002 presentation was made under the auspices of St. Louis University’s James C. Millstone Memorial Lecture^[13]

Among books cited by the Pulitzer Prize organization on its website, Harris’s book “Pulitzer’s Gold” is the top work listed^[14]

Personal life

Harris lives in Hingham, Mass., with his wife Eileen Carol McIntyre. He has two children, David McKenna Harris and R.J. Harris Jr., from his marriage to the late Andrea McKenna Harris, who died in 1998. He also has a stepson and stepdaughter, Jesse D. Laymon and Vicki Raines Laymon.^[15]

References

External links

• Pulitzer's Gold book website
• Columbia Pulitizers Gold Site
• Harris' page on poynter.org
• Beat the press on WGBH
• Millstone lecture recalls Post-Dispatch golden age
• Pulitzer's Gold book on Pulitzer website